Barcodes
The use of barcodes has grown enormously since the 1970s. We now see many companies around the world using barcodes throughout their distribution chain or at checkout. A barcode is simply just a series of parallel alternating black and white patterns that represents a sequence of numbers or characters. There are many different ways of generating them such as using images, vectors or fonts.Barcode & Label uses fonts to generate barcodes. A barcode font is a specially designed font that allows you to specify and generate barcodes with normal text characters. Printing barcodes using fonts is well-known in the auto-id industry for creating the highest quality barcodes. Fonts, besides being ubiquitous, enable deployment to a wide variety of platforms, are rastered and printed at the resolution of the printer, and are not limited by the Dots per Inch (DPI) of devices' screens.
Currently, three popular types of barcodes are supported:
- Code 39 - Code 39 barcode is one of the earliest and most widely used barcode. It is a variable length barcode, which means that you will be able to encode any number of characters. It supports the alphanumeric character set and is used in a wide variety of applications. If you have a need for using barcodes in your organization and do not want to get into the details, Code 39 is one of the recommended barcodes.
- Industrial 2 of 5 - The Industrial 2of5 barcode is used for encoding numbers. It is called 2 of 5 because the barcode is always encoded with 2 wide bars and 3 narrow bars (total of 5 bars). Each of the bars is separated by a narrow space.
- POSTNET - POSTNET is a fixed width/height barcode that is used widely by the U.S. Postal Service. It encodes numeric digits by using 5 bars and 4 spaces. The bars have two different bar heights, short and tall.